Happy Birthday Nobuo Uematsu! Top 5 Boss Battle Themes

The man who was responsible for the soundtrack of our youth, Nobuo Uematsu, turns 53 years old today. In 1985, Uematsu was an amateur musician working in a Tokyo instrument-rental shop in when an employee with the video-game company Square asked him if he would be interested in composing some songs for a new game they were working on.

Considering it a good way to make money on the side, Uematsu accepted the position. Little did he know that the game he was working on... would be a completely forgettable piece of crap no one has ever heard of called Genesis.

Still, Square liked his work and he continued to compose for a round of pornographic computer adventures for the struggling company. With Square struggling, they put all their money and talent into one last game, a revolutionary RPG called Final Fantasy.

Since then, Uematsu has gone on to score countless titles, especially in the Final Fantasy series. His work has been so brilliant and prolific that he's considered the John Williams of video games, and has long been one of the prime examples in the argument for video games as art.

Not bad for a guy who was clerking in a music store and dreaming of being a professional wrestler.

Picking five favorite Uematsu tunes was impossible. Instead, we opted to narrow it down to the Top 5 final boss themes. These are the songs that when you heard them you knew that this was it, it was you between the world of light and the world of darkness!

5. The Last Story, "The One Ruling Everything": No longer just Square's pocket music magician, Uematsu is out there exploring all kinds of new settings. Last Story is still a grand epic, but as you can tell from the linked tune it he's been spending a lot of time listening to prog metal lately. That track is just a few wailed choruses away from being a damn Dragonforce song.

4. Chrono Trigger, "Last Battle": Hopefully in the future, "Last Battle" will be as accepted a musical style as a rondo or a waltz. A game spanning different millenniums has to have a summation song that draws from the primal of the prehistoric to the sophistication of the future. Plus, for a 16-bit-era release that it has an incredibly lush and deep recording.